On April 9, David Chin, who is the CEO and one of the co-founders of a blockchain project called Thor Token, announced that the project was shutting down. Chin, whose project was based in San Franciso, indicated that the project is closing because it was unable "to gain traction and achieve commercial success."

Thor was built on top of a popular digital currency called Neo, but it reportedly suffered from a lack of sales, and it was unable to raise a sufficient amount of working capital. It was further unable to find a better location for its operations.

In the blog post in which Chin announced the decision, he stated that he had been looking to find either an organization or an individual that he could give the project to, but he just was not able to find either.

A small bright spot for fans of the project is that it will not be entirely disappearing. Chin noted that, while the project would be ceasing operations sometime in the near future, all the code and the products created from the code will remain open source. All members of the Thor community will continue to be able to access the code, and if they are interested in doing so they may modify the code as well as create forks of it.

Recently, a number of notable cryptocurrency-related projects have shuttered their operations. In December of last year, Basis, which was a significant stablecoin project based in the United States, announced that it would not only cease its operations, but it would also return most of the more than $130 million dollars it raised from private investors the previous April. Reportedly, the closure was related to concerns that one of the company's tokens would run afoul of government regulators.

In January of this year, Bitmain, which is a major Chinese digital currency mining operator, announced that it would reduce its Netherlands-based operations. The company at the time said that this was one of many cost-cutting measures it planned. The company has suffered because of the decreased profitability of mining cryptocurrencies, specifically Bitcoin.